Naked Boys...

 

We made a start on shearing today with the three boys.   Their heads all look too big for their bodies now!  :)

Now there's just the TEN girls to go...  :)

Vaccinating Sheep

 

Sorry, no photos of the actual deed because my hands were thoroughly full, but we've now given all the sheep their first dose of Heptavac.  This will protect them against clostridial diseases and pasturerellosis -- so fingers crossed no more random unexpected deaths out of the blue...

They'll need another dose in 4-6 weeks, by which point they will all have been shorn and will be thoroughly fed up with being handled by us so it might be harder to get them penned 2nd time around but it should be easier to dose them as half the battle this morning was trying to find the skin under their wool so I knew where to put the needle!

I will say though that the more sheep you have, the easier they are to herd/pen.

Chick pics!

Firstly, let me just tell you how difficult photographing chicks is...  They are all in pens to stop them being food for Cookie, so as I walk around the pen looking for an angle, the Mummy Hen invariably walks around with me, staying in-between me and the chicks.  Then there's the fact that the chicks never stand still even for half a second.  Anyhow, thank you for putting up with the fact that these are not the best pictures...

This is the first lot who are now four and a half weeks old -- they have got quite a bit of their feathers now and it is looking like two of them -- one white and one black -- have got some of the markings of the bantam -- so hopefully we will end up with a hen who has the broody traits of a bantam and the size of a full sized hen!

 

 

 

And here are the new ones hatched on Thursday -- one white and four dark.  Unfortunately the hen with the first lot is a bantam and this hen is not, so using the hens as a reference for comparing the size of the chicks is useless!  Must go find my banana...  :)

And just so they don't feel left out, here are some of this year's lambs -- starting to get chunky!

Bad things come in threes...

Following on from the death of White Hen...

The geese killed one of the ducks.  Yeah.  We know it was them because already on two previous occasions Danny heard a massive commotion from the geese and when he went to look, the male had a duck IN HIS MOUTH.  So Danny rescued the duck twice, but sadly the duck did not learn to avoid that field, and apparently we weren't around to hear the third attempt and so the goose succeeded...

Anyhow, we now have another of our original ducks back and the geese have gone back to where they came from so that is the end of the goose saga.  IMO they were not worth keeping -- they poop everywhere, even only two of them, the eggs are too big to be useful, she wouldn't sit on the eggs so no baby geese, and they are murderers...

And then, on Wednesday, Curly's black ewe lamb who I said the other day was turning out to not be black and more about that later -- well, there is no later for her, because she unexpectedly died.  She was fine on Wednesday morning.  Wednesday evening she didn't come with the rest of the flock so I went looking.  She was struggling to breath.  Checked her airways, looked fine.  Took her temperature, perfectly normal.  As I was carrying her into the barn, she just died in my arms.

She's had a post-mortem today and the vet says it was an acute respiratory infection, likely Pasteurella, so going forward I will be vaccinating.  I guess I just have to consider myself lucky that I've got away without vaccinating for this long...

So that's three deaths in about a week and a half.  Hopefully that will be it for a while now...

AND, for those of you who persisted in reading a lengthy depressing post with no photos, we have had five chicks hatch yesterday -- does that make up for the three animals we've lost?  Who knows...  Photos to come in a few days -- the weather is appalling and the hen is keeping the chicks too close for me to look properly.